Dark Matter Discovered?

The Science Blogs are alive with rumours that traces of dark matter has been found deep underground.

The Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota is the leading deep underground science and engineering laboratory in the United States.

There the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment consists of two dozens of germanium and silicon ice-hockey pucks cooled down to 40 mK. When a particle hits the detector it produces both phonons and ionization, and certain tell-tale features of these two signals allow the experimenters to sort out electron events (expected to be produced by mundane background processes) from nuclear recoils (expected to be produced by scattering of dark matter particles, as the apparatus is well shielded from ordinary nucleons).

Today, rumours that there latest experiements reveal telltale signs of dark matter began to leak:

Source: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2009/12/dark-matter-discovered.html

Phonon laser: the weirding module of our age?

In a nice example of science-fiction becoming science fact, the "weirding module" described by Frank Herbert in Dune appears to be becoming reality.  The first-ever phonon laser - which uses amplified sound - has been created.

The laser uses phonons - the smallest quantized unit of vibrational energy - and was been created by German and U.S. scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) and the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California, U.S.A.)

Source: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n9/full/nphys1367.html & http://tr.im/ynNA

Sound Black Hole

Israeli physicists have created a unique phenomena - an acoustic black hole. Instead of trapping light in the form of photons (particles of light), the Technion laboratory in Haifa have created an artificial black hole which traps particles of sound - phonons.

The sound black hole was generated in attempt to detect Hawking radiation, the as yet hypothetical radiation proposed by Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, which causes black holes to evaporate over time.

Andrew Zimmerman Jones notes that "quantum physics indicates that pairs of "virtual phonons" are constantly being created and destroyed. If one of these pairs forms near the event horizon of the sound black hole, one of the phonons may end up getting pulled into the black hole while the other escapes." This may be the best proof yet that Hawking radiation exists.

Source: http://physicsworld.com
&
http://physics.about.com

Phonon effects on magnetosensors

This article gives a good overview of the role of phonons in magnetosensor research.

"The notion is that if you have higher temperature applications, most materials' response to magnetic fields [the magnetoresistive response] falls off very rapidly because of excitations of the lattice--phonon vibrations," explained University of Chicago professor Thomas Rosenbaum. "But it turns out the mechanism we are adapting to [indium antimonide] is not limited by the phonons."

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210601942